Not like everyone else
Bats have come to longevity on the contrary
Polina Loseva, "The Attic"
There are quite a few representatives of the bat squad among the long-lived record holders. In search of mechanisms that allow them to live longer than most mammals, scientists observed the population of the large moth Myotis myotis in French Brittany.
For six years, blood was taken from animals every year and gene expression in cells was measured. It turned out that bats have very different genes active than humans or house mice. This means that bats have achieved longevity in their own unique way.
Among the long-lived animals, bats stand apart: all the other record holders achieved their results singly (like a naked digger, the only one of its kind), and bats did it almost the whole squad. However, how they managed it is still unknown. Perhaps it's their unusual mechanism of maintaining the length of telomeres – with the help of DNA repair. Or maybe the reason is the reduced activity of their immunity or resistance to oxidative stress, which develops during the flight.
The same group of scientists who studied the telomeres of bats – researchers from Ireland, France and the UK – does not give up trying to understand the origins of their longevity. This time they investigated the population of the large moth Myotis myotis in Brittany. For six years, the animals were captured, chipped, blood samples were taken from them and released back. It is difficult to determine the exact age of bats (and they live up to 37 years), it is possible to distinguish only adolescent mice from adults by bone growth zones. Therefore, scientists have accumulated a database of bat biomaterials from 0 to 7+ years old.
The researchers extracted cells from the blood of animals and measured the expression of genes in them. It turned out that the intensity of the work of most genes does not change in moths after the first year (that is, after the end of growth) regardless of age. This is not at all similar to what happens in the human body, but it is much more reminiscent of the work of the genes of another long-lived record–holder - a naked digger. It can be assumed that stable expression of the same genes throughout adult life somehow prevents age-related changes.
Then the scientists distributed the genes actively working in adult moths into functional groups. And they found that, like in other mammals, genes associated with mitochondrial activity (that is, energy production) and acquired immunity work worse in adulthood. But, unlike a human or a domestic mouse, bats retain an increased expression of DNA repair genes throughout their lives. Perhaps this explains the fact that these animals rarely get cancer. In addition, with age, the activity of genes associated with cell division arrest (probably another antitumor mechanism) and autophagy ("self-eating", the process of cell molecules and organelles renewal) increased in mice. In many mammals, genes associated with inflammation begin to work with age, because breakdowns and metabolic waste accumulate in the body. But in bats, judging by the expression of genes, inflammation does not develop. This is probably another way to live longer, since healthy cells in tissues also suffer from inflammation.
Finally, the researchers tested the work of "longevity genes" in the blood cells of moths. These are 207 genes that are somehow associated with aging and long life in humans. Of these, 23 in bats worked in exactly the opposite way compared to other mammals: man, mouse and wolf. This is, for example, the PTEN gene responsible for stopping cell division (in moths it was more active than in others), or MYC, a well–known oncogene (in moths it was suppressed).
Thus, bats fit into the genetic portrait of a centenarian, but, apparently, they came to him by another way, independent of other mammals, using their unique mechanisms.
Article by Huang et al. Longitudinal comparative transcriptomics reveals unique mechanisms underlying extended healthspan in bats published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
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